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IF THE FOUR HORSEMEN ARRIVE, OFFER BEER

"The complexity couldn’t be sustained. And so Rome toppled into what I called “catabolic collapse,” which is the process whereby a society trying to maintain itself feeds on its own infrastructure ... So basically what happened was that they’d reached Peak Empire. And so they kept on trying to expand and make the same thing work. But you conquer a chunk of Southern Germany – okay, big deal. You get a little bit of wheat. You don’t get the gold; you don’t get all the wealth that they were used to pillaging from Spain and from Greece and from Egypt and from all these settled places, which had amassed wealth over thousands of years. And so in the same way, we started with places like the Ghawar and now we’re ratcheting down to smaller and smaller, and more and more difficult, more and more costly resources ... At a certain point, you start running into real problems ... It could be that these next wars simply destroy things that never get rebuilt, if they happen ... I’m willing to bet that there are going to be a lot of towns in New Jersey that are never going to be rebuilt to the same standards they had before the storm Sandy came through ... Bit by bit, town by town, region by region, we’re having these ratcheting downward events. That’s actually the way that a civilization goes down."